Born in 1933, Piero Manzoni grew up in Milan. He first enrolled as a law student, an unexpected decision for one of the greatest artists of the last century! But he soon began painting landscapes and portraits, after which he changed course altogether. He began marking his canvases with the stamps of banal objects like pliers, nails and scissors. In 1958, he made his first ‘Achromes’, French for ‘colourless’. These were canvases covered in plaster, white clay, cotton and various fabrics… All these materials were strictly colourless. From this moment, Manzoni’s art became a constant provocation. But directed at whom? Manzoni was critical of artists who saw art as a way of becoming immortal, and he also criticized the art system, which turns artists into sacred monsters to venerate. His provocations included: signing women’s bodies to create what he called ‘Living Sculptures’; marking boiled eggs with his figure print and giving them to the public to eat in a performance called ‘Devouring art’ and creating a pedestal that transformed anyone who stood on it into an artwork, his ‘Magic Base’ . But his most irreverent work was ‘Artist’s Shit’ . For this, he filled 90 tins with his own excrement and put them up for sale, like canned food. Each tin weighs 30 grams and was given the price of 30 grams of gold. Piero Manzoni died of a heart attack in his studio in 1963; he was only 29. But during his short life, he revolutionized Italian art.

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Playing with art

Born in 1933, Piero Manzoni grew up in Milan. He first enrolled as a law student, an unexpected decision for one of the greatest artists of the last century! But he soon began painting landscapes and portraits, after which he changed course altogether. He began marking his canvases with the stamps of banal objects like pliers, nails and scissors. In 1958, he made his first ‘Achromes’, French for ‘colourless’. These were canvases covered in plaster, white clay, cotton and various fabrics… All these materials were strictly colourless. From this moment, Manzoni’s art became a constant provocation. But directed at whom? Manzoni was critical of artists who saw art as a way of becoming immortal, and he also criticized the art system, which turns artists into sacred monsters to venerate. His provocations included: signing women’s bodies to create what he called ‘Living Sculptures’; marking boiled eggs with his figure print and giving them to the public to eat in a performance called ‘Devouring art’ and creating a pedestal that transformed anyone who stood on it into an artwork, his ‘Magic Base’ . But his most irreverent work was ‘Artist’s Shit’ . For this, he filled 90 tins with his own excrement and put them up for sale, like canned food. Each tin weighs 30 grams and was given the price of 30 grams of gold. Piero Manzoni died of a heart attack in his studio in 1963; he was only 29. But during his short life, he revolutionized Italian art.